Is God's Will Found in the Gaps of Ours?

Every so often, moving in religious circles, I hear people worrying (sometimes a great deal) that attempting to exert control over some aspect of their lives will leave no room for God's will. I ran into this most recently with people discussing NFP, where I've seen several people express variations of the concern that this post expresses:

But is using NFP to prevent pregnancy really trusting God? ... The whole idea of a married couple becoming aware of the wife’s fertile times, and using that knowledge to decide whether or not to engage in marital relations seems rather presumptuous if you really think about it. How can it be that human reasoning is greater than God’s providence and His plan to add one more soul to His Creation?

However, the concern is certainly not found only in relation to decisions relating to fertility. I've often heard similar comments made about finances, along the lines of, "I realized that I was putting all this time into trying to figure out how we were going to pay our bills, when I should have just stopped worrying and left it up to God's will." On one occasion, I offered a coworker some help on finding another job within the company because he'd been dissatisfied with his job lately. However, he replied, "If it's God's will that I move on, it'll happen. I don't want to get in His way."

It strikes me that all of these suggest a kind of thinking in which if we will something, that thing is somehow artificial, it is "our will" and thus "not God's will", whereas if we manage to attain some sort of just-letting-things-come state, we are "leaving it up to God."

Now, clearly, when we sin, we set our will above God's, choosing to pursue our own goods rather than the greatest Good. However, that formulation, in itself, underlines that even when we do God's will, we are not passive. We conform our will to God's will, acting as He wishes us to act.

If someone forms and acts on a plan, whether it relates to career, finances, fertility, or what you will, the mere fact that he has formed and acted upon a plan does not mean that he is necessarily acting in contradiction or in accord with God's will.  Nor can we simplistically assume that we if we step back and do nothing, we are allowing God's will to happen.  After all, our own actions can be the instruments of God's will.  Not acting can be as much in contradiction to God's will as acting.

Cheating, Virtually

"Hey, can I look at your computer for a sec?" she asked her husband, Paul Rothrock, a 30-year-old product-support representative for a social-media ad company. He was in the living room, on his laptop, and his reaction stunned her. "No!" he hissed, pulling the computer to his chest.
 Confused, she asked him again, and he became even more agitated. "You are not looking at this!" he insisted, gripping the computer tightly.
 That was when Ms. Rothrock realized what was wrong.
 There are few moments more painful than the disclosure of an extramarital affair, an event that provokes stress and anger in both the betrayer and betrayed. What each spouse does and says in the aftermath will reverberate a long time. It is critical to stay calm, counselors say. The realization "felt like being punched in the chest," Ms. Rothrock recalls, of the moment her husband wouldn't surrender his laptop. Her training as a mental-health crisis counselor served her well when, as calmly as she could, she told her husband to hand over his computer—and his phone—or they were "done."
 Counselors say it is possible to repair a relationship after infidelity, but only if both parties are willing to work hard and honestly acknowledge shortcomings in the relationship and in themselves.
...Mr. Rothrock's affair took place by video chat and other electronic means, but it was no less sexual or emotional, he says.

I found this WSJ article on rebuilding a marriage after an affair to be an interesting read, but I was a bit surprised that the reporter should have built a whole piece about infidelity around one couple dealing with virtual cheating. Although any kind of betrayal in a marriage is damaging, the nature of physical consummation seems to indicate that an affair that involves, you know, physically cheating on your spouse might be more sexual than having a virtual affair, if not more emotional.

X is Good != You Must Do X

I've been thinking about the tendency of discussions about lifestyle choices to turn radioactive. You know: homeschooling, breastfeeding, attachment parenting, eating organic, 'sustainable' living, stay-at-home moms, NFP vs. providentialism, marrying young, etc.

One reason discussions on these topics almost invariably become fraught is that they're highly personal, but I think the big issue lurking behind this is that when someone makes an argument that "homeschooling is good" or "there are lots of good reasons to homeschool" we invariably read it as, "everyone should homeschool, and if you don't you're a bad parent."

Now, this impression is not unfounded. You can certainly find advocates of all the above topics who believe that everyone should live the way they do. However, most advocates would not go that far. They might think that more people should emulate their choices, because those choices are very good, but they would, if pressed, acknowledge that doing otherwise can be the best thing in certain situations.

Nevertheless, people tend to make the jump from "X is good" to "You must do X" and respond accordingly. I wonder if perhaps part of the reason is that we're inverting the thought process "X is bad, therefore you should not do X". It does not follow that because we must not do any things that are wrong, we must do all things that are right, but the symmetry is appealing.

Rather, it seems to me there are three categories we should consider (though not all actions will fall in one of these three):

1) Things that are wrong -- you should not do these

2) Things that are good, but not obligatory

3) Things that are good and are obligatory

Now, obviously, even if we posit that some action or lifestyle falls into 2), there's a lot of room to argue about why it's good, whether it really is good, how good it is, when it might be useful as opposed to not, etc. But at least we're clear that it's not something belonging to category 3), as in something that's obligatory.

But wait a minute: if we're classifying these sorts of activities in category 2) as "good but not obligatory", doesn't that put us back right where we started? Aren't people who don't do some good thing less good than people who do?

Not if we think about it clearly. First off, just because something is a good, does not necessarily mean that it is good in all circumstances. Secondly, we often have to choose between goods, because we simply can't do everything.

So, on the side of those arguing for a good, it's probably wise to be aware of whether you're talking about something which is a good but non-obligatory thing, or a good and obligatory thing.

And for those who see or hear someone else arguing that something is good, keep in mind that even if they are right, and what they're arguing for is good, that that does not necessarily mean you are bad (or even less good) if you don't do likewise.

Contraceptive Mentality: 19th Century Style

Anna Karenina has been my latest commuter literature, as I may have mentioned before, and this morning I hit this passage, which struck me because of all the discussion of "contraceptive mentality" which has been going on in local Catholic blog circles lately.

There's a tendency, at times, to think of our modern age as particularly afflicted while projecting onto the past a warm glow of wholesomeness. This is fairly natural. We know our own age up close and are much aware of all its faults. The past we encounter mostly through books, and it's easy to note the aspects we like without thinking so much of the rest.

What particularly struck me here is that this is a set of attitudes towards childbearing which sounds almost brutal now. After all, one of the things that makes the "contraceptive mentality" so attractive is that by rendering sex sterile, people can escape the unpleasant feeling of not liking "real" children. Either their conception can be avoided in the first place, or they can be aborted while they're "just a blob of cells". But in Russia circa 1870, we get this line of thinking out of Darya Alexandrovna (Dolly), a doting but often flustered mother, with a wandering husband and flagging strength:

At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think. So now, after this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look after them. ‘If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t upset again!’ she thought. But these questions of the present were succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the drawing room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her children in the world. ‘The girls are all right,’ she thought; ‘but the boys?’

‘It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course, there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?...’ And the thought struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman
was that in sorrow she should bring forth children.

‘The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the child—that’s what’s so intolerable,’ she thought, picturing to herself her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully:

‘I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.’

‘Well, did you grieve very much for her?’ asked Darya Alexandrovna.

‘Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.’

This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a grain of truth.

‘Yes, altogether,’ thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life, ‘pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity,indifference to everything, and most of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I’m with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment...then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains...’

Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. ‘Then the children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil propensities’ (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the raspberries), ‘education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.’ And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.

‘And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it weren’t for spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children, they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!’ Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.

UPDATE (based on some discussion with a friend, it struck me I should try to complete my thought process here a bit):

I think too often those of us who believe that contraception is wrong make an inappropriate leap into assuming that contraception came in and disrupted some idyllic situation in which families were huge and loving and every child was welcomed. But of course, that isn't the case. The reason why people adopted contraception so eagerly is because it seemed to be a solution to very real problems that made women and marriages miserable. Dolly (who really is an affectionate mother and wife, but who has a shallow and chronically unfaithful husband) is at the same time terrified of getting pregnant (which makes her unattractive to her husband, takes a toll on her body, and leaves her unable to cope well with the children which her husband is often happy to leave to her and the servants) and at the same time probably fears that her physical distance from her husband is one of the things that causes him to always be out chasing other women. And so she finds herself hating her fertility, and fearing motherhood, because it seems like it puts her in the place of denying her husband the one thing that might keep him around more. Now, does this mean that putting Dolly on the pill would have solved all her problems and made her marriage good? No. Her marriage is simply bad. Her husband would probably still cheat on her even if she were more available to him -- that's just how he is. She's in a terrible situation. It's probably a toss up whether contraception would really have helped her or not. But, it's completely obvious why if someone had offered her the seeming assurance of the pill, it would have seemed like a godsend to her.

In an odd sense, hearing this voice out of the past is a bit reassuring. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we, even if we stand in opposition to some elements of the culture, are still prisoners of it, and that when we find ourselves conflicted about these issues, that it is in some sense giving in. Really, though, "the contraceptive mentality" is simply the modern version of a conflict which has always existed for us in our fallen world and which will continue to exist as long as we do. It's hard to live by the limitations of what we are. So no, when we find these things hard, it's not because we've given in and been taken over by some spirit of the age. We're simply struggling with the same issues that people have always struggled with in marriages throughout history.

The Californians

I just don't have that much to say this week that doesn't relate to painting my bathroom, but here: I think I will never stop laughing at this:

 

A) People who live in California DO talk about driving like this.
B) "You have cancer. But don't even worry about it!"
C) Bill Hader totally cracks up in this sketch, which makes it so much funnier.

Has Rome Overreacted to the LCRW?

So, you think you're a calm and balanced guy, and you read all these news stories about how the nuns are just "stunned" that Rome would investigate them. I mean, "stunned". How could the mean old Vatican investigate nuns?

Well, Thomas L. McDonald of God and the Machine gives us a little bit of an idea. He takes a look at the upcoming LCWR Assembly 2012 (to be held in August), and notes the keynote topic: "Mystery Unfolding: Leading in the Evolutionary Now" which will be delivered by Barbara Marx Hubbard. He takes a look at Barbara Marx Hubbard's site and finds the following:

It has become obvious that a creative minority of humanity is undergoing a profound inner mutation or transformation. Evolutionary ideas are not only serving to make sense of this change, but also acting to catalyze the potential within us to transform. (Thought creates; specific thought creates specifically.)

It is the planetary crisis into which we were born that is awakening our sleeping potential for transformation. Planet Earth has given birth to a species capable of choosing whether to consciously evolve ourselves and our social forms, or to continue the course we have set toward our own extinction. And the choice is clear.

All great spiritual paths lead us to this threshold of our own consciousness, but none can guide us across the great divide — from the creature human to the cocreative human. None can guide us in managing the vast new powers given us by science and technology. None of us have been there yet.

What we can envision

The enriched noosphere, the thinking layer of Earth, is now replete with evolutionary technologies that can transform the material world. Within the next 30 to 50 years, we could transform our physical bodies, our minds, our social structures, and set in motion the emergence of a new civilization.

Science: It is said that the power of quantum computing may increase exponentially in the next 50 years bordering on silicon-based life. At the same time biologists studying aging, cloning, and stem cells tell us we may reverse aging and gain a sort of immortality. One scientist writes, “We may live 600 years and only die by accident.”

Moving deeply into the nature of matter, students of zero point energy believe that we can tap into and use the infinite sea of energy that underlies everything. Furthermore, with nanotechnology we can build as nature does—atom by atom.

Expanding beyond the earth itself, space engineers envision the formation of an extraterrestrial sphere, much as hundreds of millions of years ago the biosphere was formed. We can live in an integrated Earth/Space environment restoring the Earth, freeing ourselves from hunger and poverty, exploring the vast untapped potential of human cocreativity.

Social systems: As we shift from maximum procreation to cocreation, the Feminine would be liberated from its restrictive roles, as men and women cocreate in a balanced way for the good of the larger human family. The Masculine would be released from its long-standing roles of patriarch and protector to discover the peace and ease of true relationship and cocreation.

Patterns of unification are set in motion already, as nonprofit, corporate, and governmental alliances are built around countless initiatives. Those that are successful are already witnessing the melting of borders and boundaries that have prevented successful compromise and negotiation in the past. Political events, like the fall of the Berlin wall, are foreshadowing the possibility of unification around the globe, and creating the hope that seemingly insurmountable problems may find yet find solutions.

Spiritual grounding: Jesus said, “These and even greater works shall you do.” We may actually be on the threshold of those abilities that Christ was able to do and that He foresaw as possibilities for us all. Specifically, the ability to use conscious intent, perhaps in conjunction with scientific and technological capacities, will allow us to create bodies sensitive to thought. We may find ourselves transforming the human body from its physical, animal, degenerating phase to a regenerating and evolving phase.

This capability would be the fulfillment of the words of St. Paul: “Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound. This corruptible will become incorruptible. This mortal will put on immortality and death shall be swallowed up in victory.”

This would also be the emergence of what Alan Lithman calls, psyche materialis, and what the Bible calls, Adam of the quickening Spirit. [And so it was written: the first Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. (1 Cor. 15:45).]

Sri Aurobindo named the human being with this ability, the gnostic being; Teilhard de Chardin called it the ultra person; and I have selected the name, universal human and universal humanity. This type of human is a quantum jump beyond the species Homo sapiens. It is a new species that is incubating in millions now.

This is a Naissance; this is new for Earth — but it is not new for the universe. The name universal human is good because it connotes the reality that we are entering the phase of universal life.

Although we may never know what really happened, we do know that the story told in the Gospels is that Jesus’ resurrection was a first demonstration of what I call the post-human universal person. We are told that he did not die. He made his transition, released his animal body, and reappeared in a new body at the next level of physicality to tell all of us that we would do what he did. The new person that he became had continuity of consciousness with his life as Jesus of Nazareth, an earthly life in which he had become fully human and fully divine. Jesus' life stands as a model of the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo universalis.

Summary

Now millions of earthly humans from every spiritual tradition, from many social movements and scientific lineages of human inquiry, are evolving to the stage at which they recognize their soul, their higher self. They are becoming willing, even passionately desire, to be one with that Self. And as a critical mass of humans evolving toward their new capacities arise, humanity will undergo an unprecedented shifting in our entire way of being on this planet.

We are the generations born into this moment in history. Our powers are immense. We can destroy the earth as we know it, or alternatively, transform the material and societal limits of human life. We or our children may actually live to experience either the destruction of our life support systems (with unimaginable consequences for billions of people), or the literal transformation of our bodies from creature human life cycle to cocreative human life cycle. The choice is ours. [emphasis added]

That is what I would call some crazy-ass shit. But Thomas McDonald is classier, so he says "that’s not merely crazy: that’s weapons-grade crazy". I concur.

So. Is Rome over-reacting in thinking that there may be a few screws loose over at the LCWR? Nope. Not a bit.

Not Many Like Us

There are no more seats in the van. We bought it six years ago, when our third was an infant, and it seemed to have unimaginable amounts of room, as well as really cool seats that fold down flat into the floor. We loved it. We still like it well enough, but now every seat is full: seven seats, two adults, five kids. No room. That in and of itself can be a little frustrating. If we want to bring one of MrsDarwin's siblings or parents on a trip, we need to bring two vehicles. And with the smallest one getting close to two, you have to figure that one of these days... (And as for fighting in the back seat, it is never ending.)

So I found myself starting to look at full size vans the other day. Sure, there is the Suburban which has six seats in the back, and so do some minivans, but if I'm going to have to replace our van, I don't want to be out of room again as soon as we add one more. It's time for a full size. And I have to admit that I'm dreading it a bit. I prefer small cars. Preferably small fast cars, though you wouldn't know it from the cars I actually own at the moment. And a full size van is neither small nor fast.

Nor, I find, are they primarily marketed to consumers. They're primarily marketed to businesses. The answer, it turns out, is easily found in the handy "how many families are like yours" calculator that was being passed around last year.

This informs me that there are 205,172 households in the US consisting of a married couple and five children under 18. 0.18% of US households. Ah, but we still fit in our van. When we outgrow the van (I suppose I should say if, for one never knows, though it seems highly likely to happen eventually) we will enter an even smaller demographic: 58,747 households consisting of a married couple and six children under 18. 0.05% of US households. I'm told that the full size van market in the US over the last decade averages a little over 200,000 new vehicles sold per year, so it's pretty obvious that most customers are businesses, not families.

Maybe if we change our name to Hyatt or Marriott we could get a van with our name on it?